The other day I learned
a new word in French. My friend and I had just moved
into a new apartment, and our new neighbors were telling us
that we were living in what used to be a 'passementerie' factory. And I had no idea what
they were talking about. And so I asked them
what "passementerie" meant. Actually, I didn't exactly ask them that. It was something more like:
"An old factory for what?" I don't know this word,
what does it mean? And so they explained it to me. "You know, it was a factory
where they made tassels, ribbons, lace. All of that is called
a passementerie." I asked them to repeat
this word again, at least two or three times,
until I was unable to keep it in my head. And in the following weeks,
it popped up several times in conversations with my friend, and each time I was incapable
of saying it myself, even though from that point on
I was able to recognize it perfectly fine and knew what it meant. In fact, it wasn't until
preparing this talk that you are about to hear
that I learned it for good, thanks to the fact that I wrote it down. The way I learn French words
is through writing. It's rather frustrating,
but if I can't see them black on white, then I am incapable of remembering them. I was thrown by my own difficulties
in learning words in my second language,
especially as I had often seen some human beings
who did not have the same problems at all. They are all small, they have difficulties
in eating with a fork, they don't know how to dress themselves. In short, it all leads one to believe
that they are not very clever. And yet, they are geniuses
when it comes to learning languages. Obviously, I'm talking about babies. In my research work, I study how babies learn
their mother tongue. And just like all my colleagues,
I was fascinated by the speed with which they learn. Going back to words, did you know
that babies begin to recognize their own first name
at the age of 4 or 5 months? And that shortly afterward
they already understand several other words
like "feeding bottle" or "banana"? To realize how miraculous
this is at that point, thin about the obstacles
that babies must overcome. So, let's put ourselves
in babies' shoes for a second. For this, there's nothing better
than to listen to a mother speaking to her baby in a language foreign to us. Here we go. Imagine being the baby
of this Chinese mother. (Spoken Chinese) A natural reaction would be,
"I don't understand anything at all!" "I understand that Mom is
speaking to me and I know by the tone of her voice
that she loves me a lot. But where to begin learning my language
and knowing what she is saying to me?" Here is the problem. The baby's task is a feat in itself since it can do nothing
but hear sounds lacking meaning. Do you remember how I learned
the word 'passementerie'? First, I identified it in a sentence where I knew all the other words.
Somehow, the word went past my ears. Then, I asked for an explanation
for it from other people and finally I wrote it down
in order to retain it better. For babies,
learning can't happen like this. Firstly, because, from the outset,
they don't know any other word. So that means that their first challenge
is discovering where words begin and end in sentences. Before coming here, you were thinking
that maybe words are separated
by small instances of silence, in the same way that written words
in sentences are separated by spaces. In fact, it is nothing like that. And I hope that by listening
to that Chinese mother, you have realized that words,
for the most part, are stuck together. I assure you that to babies at this point French sounds just like Chinese. Our impression of thinking that,
when one hears a sentence in French, it is the most effortless thing
to chop it up into words is due to the fact that we recognize
these words, one after the other. For example, when I say to you: "Today many people have spoken
to me on the street," you recognize the words
"today," "many," etc. This is what creates the illusion
that words are detached units. But even if babies find a solution and end up knowing
where words begin or end, what can they do to
learn the meanings? For me, it was easy. I simply asked for an explanation. And since I know what lace,
ribbons, and tassels are, I could guess the meaning
of the mystery word: passementerie. Unfortunately, babies cannot ask
for explanations since they have no language
with which to do so. And what's more, it wouldn't help
if the parents paraphrased the words, because the babies do not understand
these other words either. I want to remind you that I had
difficulties in retaining the new word and that I could not do so
until the day I wrote it down. What do babies do to memorize
new words all the time? Once they have begun, they can learn
between five to ten new words a day. And often it is enough for them
to hear the word just once with no fear of forgetting it. Of course, this wasn't about showing you
how babies learn without being able to write down words. I think that now we all agree
that learning one's mother tongue is not something obvious. And at this point,
you will surely want to ask me: "Well, then, how do babies learn words?" Or better yet, perhaps you have
some ideas on it. One example is the belief that parents somehow teach words
to their babies. They point toward an object,
let's say a kitten, and say: "Oh, look, it's a kitten!" It is true that you're right, in part. Some research has shown that babies
are, in effect, aided by pointing as well as by their parents looking
at the objects they are talking about. But that cannot explain everything,
for many reasons. For example, how do babies know which part
of the sentence to pay attention to when their parents point at a small cat? And once the word "kitten"
is correctly identified, how do they know
that it designates the entire cat, and not its ears, the color of its fur, the way it tries to catch its tail,
or its purring? What's more, babies begin to learn words well before understanding pointing. Out of necessity, they must then have
other mechanisms of learning. For quite a while, research has allowed us
to better understand these mechanisms. It has been discovered
that babies are excellent statisticians. They gather all sorts of information
related to a word and inherently make calculations on it, like finding out
where words begin and end. Let's take an example. When babies hear the syllable "bo," the chances are good
that the next syllable will be "ttle," simply because "bottle" is a word
frequently heard in their life. But it is more difficult to predict
which syllables will follow "ttle." It could be "'s empty,"
as in: "The bottle's empty." Or "on," as in:
"I put the bottle on the table." And so on. Thus, babies retain all these patterns
of occurrence between syllables and that permits them to conclude
that "bottle" is a word, but "bottle'sempty"
and "bottleon" are not. In the same vein, they remember
which words they hear in which situation, which helps them to guess
the meanings of the words. They can hear the word "bottle"
in plenty of different situations, but their majority will have
the common element of a feeding bottle being present. As a child, every summer I would spend
2-3 weeks' vacation with my parents in a foreign country. So, very early, I heard
other languages besides mine and I loved learning other words
or sentences in a foreign language. My passion for languages
was already revealed. And I would even say
that these summer vacations put me on the path
to my current profession. For example, hearing three-year-olds
speak better French than my parents always left me a little dumbstruck. Of course, I knew that this was normal since these children were French, But I also felt that there was something
enigmatic about it all. Today, this enigma
is the subject of my research. After a certain age,
we go through plenty of difficulty trying to learn a foreign language. But babies, however
small and vulnerable they might be, learn their mother tongue
without obvious effort. In the past 30 years, we've begun
to understand how they do it. But the question will continue to keep
us wondering for a long time. Whatever the case may be,
all this research and all these discoveries
take nothing away from the marvel that parents experience
when their baby says its first word. Thank you. (Applause)
